Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense, its components, or any agency of the U.S. government.

Photo by Glenn Aronwits

Reach for Diversity, Unleash Potential

by Colonel Patricia A. Csànk, USAF

he Value of Outsiders

I am a career outsider. I have never held any particular leadership position longer than two years, but that’s not uncommon in my profession. Like many of my colleagues, I am a generalist, and resist “expertise” as I see it as a potentially inhibiting label. I value the first few months of any new assignment because it’s when I do my most critical thinking and purposeful questioning. I suspect many people see an outsider as either a drag on the team or a potential threat, particularly if she is the leader, so I try to respectfully assure people of my intent to learn while I settle in and hopefully build trust. Still, outsiders upset the natural order of things, and for well-established teams the idea of any change, even if temporary, may wreak havoc on the team and the leader.

I knew going in as the head of a United States Air Force (USAF) supply chain organization that I needed to calibrate my leadership style to the team, simultaneously giving them an opportunity to do the same. It took a conscious effort to ease into familiarity as I worked to understand the organization, its people and culture. It wasn’t long before I heard that many saw me as too young, too energetic and unqualified to lead the team because I lacked supply experience. While true by varying degrees, there was also a complex and powerful dynamic between the team’s informal leaders based on diverse age, experience and qualifications, which couldn’t be ignored or overlooked. To be fair, they were regarded by the greater USAF logistics community as experts and collectively represented more than 140 years of military supply chain experience.

I quickly learned that my agenda for the team had already been set by my superiors: implement process improvement practices across the portfolio. We were nearly three years behind the majority of our headquarters because we strongly believed that while the model was built for commodities production, it was not right for service organizations. As an outsider to the debate, I researched the model and came away from our headquarter’s training program with mixed feelings on how we might apply these practices and whether we would gain much in return for our time and energy investments. For me, three truths came into immediate focus:

1. My team was right – the program’s scripting, coaching and success stories did not fit service organizations;
2. It didn’t matter – I had to implement it; and
3. I was about to make a very unpopular announcement.

I wondered what excellence looked like to my team of long-standing experts. My trusted deputy assured me it didn’t align with my site picture, and I then wondered whether I had the stomach to pursue my vision of excellence.

Photo by Glenn Aronwits

Unleashing Potential: The Diversity Imperative

The team’s reaction: “Solutions looking for problems…” “We don’t need change for the sake of change from someone without the expertise to understand…” “…widespread national security risks while we waste time…” and other allegations of humanitarian crimes levied against The Good Idea Fairy. My attempt at motivating to a new vision of excellence led to me reshaping any fear I had about their reaction into a stubborn commitment to making the program work for us.

I dismissed a brute force strategy, which would likely assure the program’s failure immediately after my tenure, if I survived that long. Similarly, a hands-off, blind mandate to make it happen didn’t feel right either. I accepted that this would be a test of stamina over two years, and that to lead this team through the program’s implementation, I’d need to temper my instinct to do it fast and do it my way. Strangely, I realized that to lead my team to excellence, I had to not be the leader.

Strangely, I realized that to lead my team to excellence, I had to not be the leader.

I thought about who the ideal leader for this project would be but couldn’t settle on any one person. Instead I appointed a core group of leaders — the Executive Council — who could appeal to our workforce’s diverse cohorts: younger, older, extroverts, introverts, military, non-military, male, female. The people picked to serve on this council displayed shades of respect, competition and antagonism, which I felt could create the intellectual tension necessary to gain momentum, even if by one-upmanship. To disarm angst over my direction to implement the program, I acknowledged my lack of supply chain expertise and took a risk in saying that we wouldn’t implement the program if after scoping our organization’s functions it became clear that there was just no way to do it. I assigned the Council several tasks, supporting discrete objectives for each of their work sections and allowing them to set the milestone delivery pace. I then got out of the way.

Fearless Excellence: A Trust Proposition

Six months after the Executives Council concluded their work, three teams marched forward with self-initiated process improvement concepts, an unexpected and exciting outcome. Patient coaching had helped the teams manage setbacks as they worked through their objectives. Admittedly, the concepts for two of the teams were thin, but what mattered was that they had a vision and they wanted to work at it. The third team’s concept was nothing short of a mind-blowing success. The team’s leader was a plainspoken, audacious, experienced military officer with minimal supply chain exposure. After months of staring at underperforming processes, he recognized that we didn’t understand the problem the processes were meant to cure. What masqueraded as supply problems were actually policy and authority constraints, which exacerbated chokepoints and undermined agility, process discipline and resource stewardship. It took his leadership and a team of diversely experienced thinkers to propel our organization to global prominence within our community as THE team to go to for their supply chain woes.

It turns out the hardest part of giving people time and decision space is trust, particularly when neither their loyalty nor their agenda is assured. I learned to be disciplined and patient in protecting the team’s time and resources for self-discovery, creativity and innovative experiments. I also learned that it isn’t enough to admire diversity or to celebrate it — we must strive for it. And more than the team’s potential, my own potential as a leader was unleashed when I let go of my fear and trusted people to exploit their mistakes and later translate their wins to organizational excellence.